In the light of the brokenness and suffering of this world and the trial and afflictions Christian’s experience what can they sing when they feel like it’s Easter Friday or Easter Saturday and not yet Easter Sunday?
Some (acting a little like Job’s friends) heap pain upon pain by chiding them for ‘living on the wrong side of the resurrection’ and not living in the victorious Christian life that Christ has won for us. Yet they seem to expect those following Christ to live a type of life that is divorced from the life Jesus himself actually lived – a life marked with periods of suffering, betrayal, loss, persecution, and poverty.
So what then can we sing in these times?
Carl Trueman offers these thoughts about reclaiming the psalms and in particular laments. It is too long to reproduce here but do go read. Just a flavour (a pretty sharp one too):
A diet of unremittingly jolly choruses and hymns inevitably creates an unrealistic horizon of expectation which sees the normative Christian life as one long triumphalist street party — a theologically incorrect and a pastorally disastrous scenario in a world of broken individuals. Has an unconscious belief that Christianity is — or at least should be — all about health, wealth, and happiness silently corrupted the content of our worship?
…
In the last year, I have asked three very different evangelical audiences what miserable Christians can sing in church. On each occasion my question has elicited uproarious laughter, as if the idea of a broken-hearted, lonely, or despairing Christian was so absurd as to be comical — and yet I posed the question in all seriousness. Is it any wonder that British evangelicalism, from the Reformed to the Charismatic, is almost entirely a comfortable, middle-class phenomenon?
You can read a bit more of the article in another extract here.
Some disclaimers
Perhaps it is the case that a lot of the Psalm and the laments are individual, rather than corporate and that should have an impact of whether we sing them alone or when we gather.
Also, I’m not asking that we become yet more narcissistic and introspective and that we wallow in self-pity and self-absorption. No, we do need to look to Christ! Chris Thomas puts his finger carefully on that error:
If you are low, don’t go to the Scriptures to find your low-ness. That can be a real issue, can’t it: we can go to the Bible always to find ourselves in it. Go to the Scriptures to find God, and especially in the person of Jesus Christ, in the Scriptures.
Nor am I asking that we forget that Christ is Risen! No! I rejoice in it.
Yet I am concerned that we do not come under ‘the tyranny of happiness’, in which ‘joy’ is to be found by forgetting our circumstances. (Worship leader: ‘let’s leave aside all the things of the week and just focus on our Lord Jesus’.) I am persuaded that the joy that comes by the Spirit is a joy that relies on the Spirit and not circumstances and is a joy that is present in the midst of trial and affliction. We bring all of ourselves to Jesus as living sacrifices.
Final thoughts
This is my problem: I wonder with Robin Parry, “Do we lack the faith and courage of Old Testament saints to lament?”.
This is my problem: I can’t imagine singing a song that had these lines in, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world (John 16:33)”. Is it because we want to proclaim to ourselves and other a different message, a different gospel?
Do we preach against a health, wealth and happiness gospel in the pulpit but sing it in the pew?
